Shema: Active Listening
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)
These are the opening words of the Shema prayer - the most important and central prayer throughout Jewish history.
Shema is simply the first word of this passage of Scripture, meaning to hear.
But this hearing is more than the incoming of sound waves vibrating our eardrums; it transcends the information that our auditory nerves communicate to our brains.
Hearing from God is a call to embodiment, not merely acknowledgement or cognition. It’s an assertion to prepare oneself to respond in trust and obedience.
Our call to listen entails experiencing the weight of Adonai’s words and acting upon the implications of his words as an outpouring of ourselves.
When the Lord speaks to us (truths both ancient and new), they are meant to affect us - shaping us like and unifying us with our Maker.
That said, the Shema Prayer is both a declaration of the nature of our God, as well as a statement of our posture towards Him.
By announcing the oneness of Elohim at the beginning, we are claiming that our Lord is of a different essence than the plethora of gods that surrounds us. We are acknowledging both his wholeness and his presence in all that is good, beautiful, and true.
As Paul of Tarsus put it: there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:5-6). This includes us, as those who are “in his own image” (Genesis 1:27).
Then the prayer continues, revealing that foundational to our divinely suffused image and response is Love - a love that permeates our entirety and inmost being.
Perhaps this also proclaims another truth of ourselves and God - that we are relational, for true love too is relational. It’s as if to say we cannot help but become God-like - more one with God - as we practice loving Him.
In aligning these musings, consider the simple Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) diagram that displays how:
Thoughts create feelings
Feelings create behaviors
And behaviors reinforce thoughts
In this text, we are told to hear (to listen and give thought to, towards the end of action) and practice love (as a behavioral response), but by what resource are we to practice love?
Our heart and soul.
(you can look at the term “might” separately from a previous post - link here).
In other words: conceptual doctrines of monotheism cannot alone bring forth wholehearted love; it takes the fullness of our bodies and souls and spirits feeling and knowing the lovingkindness of Adonai to stir our thoughts toward authentic action.
Take marriage, for example.
My wife knows that we are married and have entered into covenant oneness together, and she knows that central to our marriage is expressing love towards one another. But, should there be a lost sense of tenderness and positive regard for me, that would greatly diminish both her experience of loving me and how she displays her love for me.
That to say…
Listening to God isn’t a “mind-over-matter” approach, but a nurtured trust and affection. It is a cultivated connection, not a coerced one.
As we hear of the oneness of God (and our belonging in his oneness), may our hearts and souls know the warmth of his love for us in such a way that springs up practiced love like a fountainhead of living water.
